Many fishing boats are equipped with one or more types of fishing rod holders to support saltwater or freshwater fishing rods when the boat is in transit or in use on the water. Depending on the design of the boat, the foredeck may include compartments with rod holders and there are often rod holders located along the port and/or starboard sides of the boat. If the boat has a console it may be provided with rod holders, and leaning posts or other seating arrangements on the boat typically include rod holders. Larger boats often have t-tops or the like which have rod holders as well.
All of the rod holders of the type described above are necessarily a fixture on the boat in the sense that they are not portable. Depending on the storage facility used by the boater, or the location where the boat is docked, it may be necessary to remove rods and other equipment from the boat when it is not in use to avoid theft. This presents the issue of how to conveniently and safely transport rods to and from the boat. It is not uncommon for a fisherman to rig and use a number of rods during a single day of fishing, and there may be two or more people fishing on the same boat. The boat owner and his or her guests need a convenient way of transporting their rods to and from the boat, and, in some cases, storing the rods while the boat is in use on a fishing trip.
This problem has been addressed to some extent in the prior art as shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,364,150 to Persinger and U.S. Pat. No. 6,254,055 to Lamberson, Jr. The Persinger patent teaches an ice fishing bucket with a foam ring at the top formed with a number of slits, and a foam plate at the bottom having a number of holes. The fishing rods are placed in the interior of the bucket so that the end of the rod is received within a hole in the bottom plate, and a portion of the rod is captured within a slit in the foam ring to hold it in place. In the Lamberson, Jr. design, a bucket is provided with an insert having top and bottom plates connected by a number of vertical posts. The plates are formed with cut-outs within which the rods are held inside of the bucket.
Other patents disclose buckets having tubes or rings which support a fishing pole, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,658,786 to Williams, U.S. Pat. No. 3,603,019 to Smeltzer and D384,391 to Bastian. Additionally, U.S. Pat. No. 6,135,467 to Tagariello teaches a support stand for a bucket having a number of upstanding tubes which could support fishing poles, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,571,964 to Bogathy is directed to a bucket with holes formed on one side which support the bottom end of a pole while fishing.